_THE STORY OF THE PRODIGAL WIFE_
HOSEA i.-iii.
It has often been remarked that, unlike the first Doomster of Israel,
Israel's first Evangelist was one of themselves, a native and
citizen, perhaps even a priest, of the land to which he was sent.
This appears even in his treatment of the stage and soil of his
ministry. Contrast him in this respect with Amos.
In the Book of Amos we have few glimpses of the scenery of Israel,
and these always by flashes of the lightnings of judgment: the towns
in drought or earthquake or siege; the vineyards and orchards under
locusts or mildew; Carmel itself desolate, or as a hiding-place from
God's wrath.
But Hosea's love steals across his whole land like the dew, provoking
every separate scent and colour, till all Galilee lies before us,
lustrous and fragrant as nowhere else outside the parables of Jesus.
The Book of Amos, when it would praise God's works, looks to the
stars. But the poetry of Hosea clings about his native soil like its
trailing vines. If he appeals to the heavens, it is only that they
may speak to the earth, and the earth to the corn and the wine, and
the corn and the wine to Jezreel.[450] Even the wild beasts--and
Hosea tells us of their cruelty almost as much as Amos--he cannot
shut out of the hope of his love: _I will make a covenant for them
with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with
the creeping things of the ground_.[451] God's love-gifts to His
people are corn and wool, flax and oil; while spiritual blessings
are figured in the joys of them who sow and reap. With Hosea we feel
all the seasons of the Syrian year: early rain and latter rain, the
first flush of the young corn, the scent of the vine blossom, the
_first ripe fig of the fig-tree in her first season_, the bursting of
the lily; the wild vine trailing on the hedge, the field of tares,
the beauty of the full olive in sunshine and breeze; the mists and
heavy dews of a summer morning in Ephraim, the night winds laden with
the air of the mountains, _the scent of Lebanon_.[452] Or it is the
dearer human sights in valley and field: the smoke from the chimney,
the chaff from the threshing-floor, the doves startled to their
towers, the fowler and his net; the breaking up of the fallow ground,
the harrowing of the clods, the reapers, the heifer that treadeth out
the corn; the team of draught oxen surmounting the steep road, and at
the top the kindly driver setting in food to their jaws.[453]
Where, I say, do we find anything like this save in the parables
of Jesus? For the love of Hosea was as the love of that greater
Galilean: however high, however lonely it soared, it was yet rooted
in the common life below, and fed with the unfailing grace of a
thousand homely sources.
But just as the Love which first showed itself in the sunny Parables
of Galilee passed onward to Gethsemane and the Cross, so the love of
Hosea, that had wakened with the spring lilies and dewy summer mornings
of the North, had also, ere his youth was spent, to meet its agony and
shame. These came upon the prophet in his home, and in her in whom so
loyal and tender a heart had hoped to find his chiefest sanctuary next
to God. There are, it is true, some of the ugliest facts of human life
about this prophet's experience; but the message is one very suited to
our own hearts and times. Let us read this story of the Prodigal Wife
as we do that other Galilean tale of the Prodigal Son. There as well
as here are harlots; but here as well as there is the clear mirror of
the Divine Love. For the Bible never shuns realism when it would expose
the exceeding hatefulness of sin or magnify the power of God's love to
redeem. To an age which is always treating conjugal infidelity either
as a matter of comedy or as a problem of despair, the tale of Hosea
and his wife may still become, what it proved to his own generation, a
gospel full of love and hope.
The story, and how it led Hosea to understand God's relations to
sinful men, is told in the first three chapters of his book. It opens
with the very startling sentence: _The beginning of the word of
Jehovah to Hosea:--And Jehovah said to Hosea, Go, take thee a wife of
harlotry and children of harlotry: for the Land hath committed great
harlotry in departing from Jehovah._[454]
The command was obeyed. _And he went and took Gomer, daughter of
Diblaim;_[455] _and she conceived, and bare to him a son. And
Jehovah said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little and
I shall visit the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will
bring to an end the kingdom of the house of Israel; and it shall
be on that day that I shall break the bow of Israel in the Vale
of Jezreel_--the classic battle-field of Israel.[456] _And she
conceived again, and bare a daughter; and He said to him, Call her
name Un-Loved_, or _That-never-knew-a-Father's-Pity;_[457] _for I
will not again have pity_--such pity as a Father hath--_on the house
of Israel, that I should fully forgive them._[458] _And she weaned
Un-Pitied, and conceived, and bare a son. And He said, Call his name
Not-My-People; for ye are not My people, and I--I am not yours._[459]
It is not surprising that divers interpretations have been put upon
this troubled tale. The words which introduce it are so startling
that very many have held it to be an allegory, or parable, invented
by the prophet to illustrate, by familiar human figures, what
was at that period the still difficult conception of the Love of
God for sinful men. But to this well-intended argument there are
insuperable objections. It implies that Hosea had first awakened
to the relations of Jehovah and Israel--He faithful and full of
affection, she unfaithful and thankless--and that then, in order to
illustrate the relations, he had invented the story. To that we have
an adequate reply. In the first place, though it were possible, it
is extremely improbable, that such a man should have invented such
a tale about his wife, or, if he was unmarried, about himself. But,
in the second place, he says expressly that his domestic experience
was the _beginning of Jehovah's word to him_. That is, he passed
through it first, and only afterwards, with the sympathy and insight
thus acquired, he came to appreciate Jehovah's relation to Israel.
Finally, the style betrays narrative rather than parable. The simple
facts are told; there is an absence of elaboration; there is no
effort to make every detail symbolic; the names Gomer and Diblaim are
apparently those of real persons; every attempt to attach a symbolic
value to them has failed.
She was, therefore, no dream, this woman, but flesh and blood: the
sorrow, the despair, the sphinx of the prophet's life; yet a sphinx
who in the end yielded her riddle to love.
Accordingly a large number of other interpreters have taken the story
throughout as the literal account of actual facts. This is the theory
of many of the Latin and Greek Fathers,[460] of many of the Puritans
and of Dr. Pusey--by one of those agreements into which, from such
opposite schools, all these commentators are not infrequently drawn
by their common captivity to the letter of Scripture.[461] When you
ask them, How then do you justify that first strange word of God
to Hosea,[462] if you take it literally and believe that Hosea was
charged to marry a woman of public shame? they answer either that
such an evil may be justified by the bare word of God, or that it was
well worth the end, the salvation of a lost soul.[463] And indeed
this tragedy would be invested with an even greater pathos if it
were true that the human hero had passed through a self-sacrifice
so unusual, had incurred such a shame for such an end. The
interpretation, however, seems forbidden by the essence of the story.
Had not Hosea's wife been pure when he married her she could not have
served as a type of the Israel whose earliest relations to Jehovah
he describes as innocent. And this is confirmed by other features of
the book: by the high ideal which Hosea has of marriage, and by that
sense of early goodness and early beauty passing away like morning
mist, which is so often and so pathetically expressed that we cannot
but catch in it the echo of his own experience. As one has said to
whom we owe, more than to any other, the exposition of the gospel in
Hosea,[464] "The struggle of Hosea's shame and grief when he found
his wife unfaithful is altogether inconceivable unless his first love
had been pure and full of trust in the purity of its object."
How then are we to reconcile with this the statement of that command
to take a wife of the character so frankly described? In this way--and
we owe the interpretation to the same lamented scholar.[465] When,
some years after his marriage, Hosea at last began to be aware of the
character of her whom he had taken to his home, and while he still
brooded upon it, God revealed to him why He who knoweth all things
from the beginning had suffered His servant to marry such a woman; and
Hosea, by a very natural anticipation, in which he is imitated by other
prophets,[466] pushed back his own knowledge of God's purpose to the
date when that purpose began actually to be fulfilled, the day of his
betrothal. This, though he was all unconscious of its fatal future, had
been to Hosea the beginning of the word of the Lord. On that uncertain
voyage he had sailed with sealed orders.
Now this is true to nature, and may be matched from our own experience.
"The beginning of God's word" to any of us--where does it lie? Does it
lie in the first time the meaning of our life became articulate, and we
were able to utter it to others? Ah no; it always lies far behind that,
in facts and in relationships, of the Divine meaning of which we are
at the time unconscious, though now we know. How familiar this is in
respect to the sorrows and adversities of life: dumb, deadening things
that fall on us at the time with no more voice than clods falling on
coffins of dead men, we have been able to read them afterwards as the
clear call of God to our souls. But what we thus so readily admit about
the sorrows of life may be equally true of any of those relations which
we enter with light and unawed hearts, conscious only of the novelty
and the joy of them. It is most true of the love which meets a man as
it met Hosea in his opening manhood.
How long Hosea took to discover his shame he indicates by a few
hints which he suffers to break from the delicate reserve of his
story. He calls the first child his own; and the boy's name, though
ominous of the nation's fate, has no trace of shame upon it. Hosea's
Jezreel was as Isaiah's Shear-Jashub or Maher-shalal-hash-baz. But
Hosea does not claim the second child; and in the name of this little
lass, Lo-Ruhamah, _she-that-never-knew-a-father's-love_, orphan not
by death but by her mother's sin, we find proof of the prophet's
awakening to the tragedy of his home. Nor does he own the third
child, named _Not-my-people_, that could also mean _No-kin-of-mine_.
The three births must have taken at least six years;[467] and once at
least, but probably oftener, Hosea had forgiven the woman, and till
the sixth year she stayed in his house. Then either he put her from
him, or she went her own way. She sold herself for money, and finally
drifted, like all of her class, into slavery.[468]
Such were the facts of Hosea's grief, and we have now to attempt to
understand how that grief became his gospel. We may regard the stages
of the process as two: first, when he was led to feel that his sorrow
was the sorrow of the whole nation; and, second, when he comprehended
that it was of similar kind to the sorrow of God Himself.
While Hosea brooded upon his pain one of the first things he would
remember would be the fact, which he so frequently illustrates, that
the case of his home was not singular, but common and characteristic
of his day. Take the evidence of his book, and there must have been
in Israel many such wives as his own. He describes their sin as the
besetting sin of the nation, and the plague of Israel's life. But to
lose your own sorrow in the vaster sense of national trouble--that
is the first consciousness of a duty and a mission. In the analogous
vice of intemperance among ourselves we have seen the same experience
operate again and again. How many a man has joined the public warfare
against that sin, because he was aroused to its national consequences
by the ruin it had brought to his own home! And one remembers from
recent years a more illustrious instance, where a domestic grief--it
is true of a very different kind--became not dissimilarly the opening
of a great career of service to the people:--
"I was in Leamington, and Mr. Cobden called on me. I was then in
the depths of grief--I may almost say of despair, for the light
and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left
on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and
a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber
above us. Mr. Cobden called on me as his friend, and addressed
me, as you may suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he
looked up and said: 'There are thousands and thousands of homes in
England at this moment where wives and mothers and children are
dying of hunger. Now, when the first paroxysm of your grief is
passed, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest
until the Corn Laws are repealed.'"[469]
Not dissimilarly was Hosea's pain overwhelmed by the pain of his
people. He remembered that there were in Israel thousands of homes
like his own. Anguish gave way to sympathy. The mystery became the
stimulus to a mission.
But, again, Hosea traces this sin of his day to the worship of
strange gods. He tells the fathers of Israel, for instance, that they
need not be surprised at the corruption of their wives and daughters
when they themselves bring home from the heathen rites the infection
of light views of love.[470] That is to say, the many sins against
human love in Israel, the wrong done to his own heart in his own
home, Hosea connects with the wrong done to the Love of God, by His
people's desertion of Him for foreign and impure rites. Hosea's own
sorrow thus became a key to the sorrow of God. Had he loved this
woman, cherished and honoured her, borne with and forgiven her, only
to find at the last his love spurned and hers turned to sinful men:
so also had the Love of God been treated by His chosen people, and
they had fallen to the loose worship of idols.
Hosea was the more naturally led to compare his relations to his wife
with Jehovah's to Israel, by certain religious beliefs current among
the Semitic peoples. It was common to nearly all Semitic religions
to express the union of a god with his land or with his people by
the figure of marriage. The title which Hosea so often applies to
the heathen deities, Ba'al, meant originally not "lord" of his
worshippers, but "possessor" and endower of his land, its husband and
fertiliser. A fertile land was "a land of Ba'al," or "Be'ulah," that
is, "possessed" or "blessed by a Ba'al."[471] Under the fertility
was counted not only the increase of field and flock, but the human
increase as well; and thus a nation could speak of themselves as
the children of the Land, their mother, and of her Ba'al, their
father.[472] When Hosea, then, called Jehovah the husband of Israel,
it was not an entirely new symbol which he invented. Up to his time,
however, the marriage of Heaven and Earth, of a god and his people,
seems to have been conceived in a physical form which ever tended to
become more gross; and was expressed, as Hosea points out, by rites
of a sensual and debasing nature, with the most disastrous effects on
the domestic morals of the people. By an inspiration, whose ethical
character is very conspicuous, Hosea breaks the physical connection
altogether. Jehovah's Bride is not the Land, but the People, and
His marriage with her is conceived wholly as a moral relation. Not
that He has no connection with the physical fruits of the land: corn,
wine, oil, wool and flax. But these are represented only as the
signs and ornaments of the marriage, love-gifts from the husband to
the wife.[473] The marriage itself is purely moral: _I will betroth
her to Me in righteousness and justice, in leal love and tender
mercies_.[474] From her in return are demanded faithfulness and
growing knowledge of her Lord.
It is the re-creation of an Idea. Slain and made carrion by the
heathen religions, the figure is restored to life by Hosea. And this
is a life everlasting. Prophet and apostle, the Israel of Jehovah,
the Church of Christ, have alike found in Hosea's figure an unfailing
significance and charm. Here we cannot trace the history of the
figure; but at least we ought to emphasise the creative power which
its recovery to life proves to have been inherent in prophecy. This
is one of those triumphs of which the God of Israel said: _Behold, I
make all things new_.[475]
Having dug his figure from the mire and set it upon the rock, Hosea
sends it on its way with all boldness. If Jehovah be thus the husband
of Israel, _her first husband, the husband of her youth_, then
all her pursuit of the Ba'alim is unfaithfulness to her marriage
vows. But she is worse than an adulteress; she is a harlot. She has
fallen for gifts. Here the historical facts wonderfully assisted
the prophet's metaphor. It was a fact that Israel and Jehovah were
first wedded in the wilderness upon conditions, which by the very
circumstances of desert life could have little or no reference to
the fertility of the earth, but were purely personal and moral. And
it was also a fact that Israel's declension from Jehovah came after
her settlement in Canaan, and was due to her discovery of other
deities, in possession of the soil, and adored by the natives as the
dispensers of its fertility. Israel fell under these superstitions,
and, although she still formally acknowledged her bond to Jehovah,
yet in order to get her fields blessed and her flocks made fertile,
her orchards protected from blight and her fleeces from scab, she
went after the local Ba'alim.[476] With bitter scorn Hosea points out
that there was no true love in this: it was the mercenariness of a
harlot, selling herself for gifts.[477] And it had the usual results.
The children whom Israel bore were not her husband's.[478] The new
generation in Israel grew up in ignorance of Jehovah, with characters
and lives strange to His Spirit. They were Lo-Ruhamah: He could not
feel towards them such pity as a father hath.[479] They were Lo-Ammi:
not at all His people. All was in exact parallel to Hosea's own
experience with his wife; and only the real pain of that experience
could have made the man brave enough to use it as a figure of his
God's treatment by Israel.
Following out the human analogy, the next step should have been for
Jehovah to divorce His erring spouse. But Jehovah reveals to the
prophet that this is not His way. For He is _God and not man, the
Holy One in the midst of thee. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?
How shall I surrender thee, O Israel? My heart is turned within Me,
My compassions are kindled together!_
Jehovah will seek, find and bring back the wanderer. Yet the
process shall not be easy. The gospel which Hosea here preaches
is matched in its great tenderness by its full recognition of the
ethical requirements of the case. Israel may not be restored without
repentance, and cannot repent without disillusion and chastisement.
God will therefore show her that her lovers, the Ba'alim, are unable
to assure to her the gifts for which she followed them. These are His
corn, His wine, His wool and His flax, and He will take them away
for a time. Nay more, as if mere drought and blight might still be
regarded as some Ba'al's work, He who has always manifested Himself
by great historic deeds will do so again. He will remove herself from
the land, and leave it a waste and a desolation. The whole passage
runs as follows, introduced by the initial _Therefore_ of judgment:--
_Therefore, behold, I am going to hedge_[480] _up her_[481] _way with
thorns, and build her_[482] _a wall, so that she find not her paths.
And she shall pursue her paramours and shall not come upon them, seek
them and shall not find them; and she shall say, Let me go and return
to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now. She knew
not, then, that it was I who gave her the corn and the wine and the
oil; yea, silver I heaped upon her and gold--they worked it up for
the Ba'al!_[483] Israel had deserted the religion that was historical
and moral for the religion that was physical. But the historical
religion was the physical one. Jehovah who had brought Israel to the
land was also the God of the Land. He would prove this by taking
away its blessings. _Therefore I will turn and take away My corn in
its time and My wine in its season, and I will withdraw My wool and
My flax that should have covered her nakedness. And now_--the other
initial of judgment--_I will lay bare her shame to the eyes of her
lovers, and no man shall rescue her from My hand. And I will make
an end of all her joyaunce, her pilgrimages, her New-Moons and her
Sabbaths, with every festival; and I will destroy her vines and her
figs of which she said, "They are a gift, mine own, which my lovers
gave me," and I will turn them to jungle and the wild beast shall
devour them. So shall I visit upon her the days of the Ba'alim, when
she used to offer incense to them, and decked herself with her rings
and her jewels and went after her paramours, but Me she forgat--'tis
the oracle of Jehovah._ All this implies something more than such
natural disasters as those in which Amos saw the first chastisements
of the Lord. Each of the verses suggests, not only a devastation of
the land by war,[484] but the removal of the people into captivity.
Evidently, therefore, Hosea, writing about 745, had in view a speedy
invasion by Assyria, an invasion which was always followed up by the
exile of the people subdued.
This is next described, with all plainness, under the figure of
Israel's early wanderings in the wilderness, but is emphasised as
happening only for the end of the people's penitence and restoration.
The new hope is so melodious that it carries the language into metre.
_Therefore, lo! I am to woo her, and I will bring her to the
wilderness,_
_And I will speak home to her heart._
_And from there I will give to her her vineyards,_
_And the Valley of Achor for a doorway of hope._
_And there she shall answer_ Me _as in the days of her youth,_
_And as the day when she came up from the land of Miṣraim._
To us the terms of this passage may seem formal and theological.
But to every Israelite some of these terms must have brought back
the days of his own wooing. _I will speak home to her heart_ is a
forcible expression, like the German "an das Herz" or the sweet
Scottish "it cam' up roond my heart," and was used in Israel as
from man to woman when he won her.[485] But the other terms have an
equal charm. The prophet, of course, does not mean that Israel shall
be literally taken back to the desert. But he describes her coming
Exile under that ancient figure, in order to surround her penitence
with the associations of her innocency and her youth. By the grace
of God, everything shall begin again as at first. The old terms
_wilderness_, _the giving of vineyards_, _Valley of Achor_, are, as
it were, the wedding ring restored.
As a result of all this (whether the words be by Hosea or another),[486]
_It shall be in that day--'tis Jehovah's oracle--that thou
shalt call Me, My husband,_
_And thou shalt not again call Me, My Ba'al:_
_For I will take away the names of the Ba'alim from her
mouth,_
_And they shall no more be remembered by their names._
There follows a picture of the ideal future, in which--how unlike the
vision that now closes the Book of Amos!--moral and spiritual beauty,
the peace of the land and the redemption of the people, are wonderfully
mingled together, in a style so characteristic of Hosea's heart. It is
hard to tell where the rhythmical prose passes into actual metre.
_And I will make for them a covenant in that day with the wild beasts,
and with the birds of the heavens, and with the creeping things of the
ground; and the bow and the sword and battle will I break from the
land, and I will make you to dwell in safety. And I will betroth thee
to Me for ever, and I will betroth thee to Me in righteousness and in
justice, in leal love and in tender mercies; and I will betroth thee to
Me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know Jehovah._
_And it shall be on that day I will speak--'tis the oracle of
Jehovah--I will speak to the heavens, and they shall speak to the
earth; and the earth shall speak to the corn and the wine and the
oil, and they shall speak to Jezreel, the scattered like seed_ across
many lands; _but I will sow him_[487] _for Myself in the land: and
I will have a father's pity upon Un-Pitied; and to Not-My-People_ I
will say. _My people thou art! and he shall say, My God!_[488]
The circle is thus completed on the terms from which we started. The
three names which Hosea gave to the children, evil omens of Israel's
fate, are reversed, and the people restored to the favour and love of
their God.
We might expect this glory to form the culmination of the prophecy.
What fuller prospect could be imagined than that we see in the close
of the second chapter? With a wonderful grace, however, the prophecy
turns back from this sure vision of the restoration of the people as
a whole, to pick up again the individual from whom it had started,
and whose unclean rag of a life had fluttered out of sight before
the national fortunes sweeping in upon the scene. This was needed to
crown the story--this return to the individual.
_And Jehovah said unto me, Once more go, love a wife that is loved
of a paramour and is an adulteress,_[489] _as Jehovah loveth the
children of Israel, the while they are turning to other gods, and love
raisin-cakes_--probably some element in the feasts of the gods of the
land, the givers of the grape. _Then I bought her to me for fifteen
pieces of silver and a homer of barley and a lethech of wine._[490]
_And I said to her, For many days shall thou abide for me alone; thou
shall not play the harlot, thou shall not be for any husband; and
I for my part also shall be so towards thee. For the days are many
that the children of Israel shall abide without a king and without a
prince, without sacrifice and without maççebah, and without ephod and
teraphim._[491] _Afterwards the children of Israel shall turn and seek
Jehovah their God and David their king, and shall be in awe of Jehovah
and towards His goodness in the end of the days._[492]
Do not let us miss the fact that the story of the wife's restoration
follows that of Israel's, although the story of the wife's
unfaithfulness had come before that of Israel's apostasy. For this
order means that, while the prophet's private pain preceded his
sympathy with God's pain, it was not he who set God, but God who set
him, the example of forgiveness. The man learned the God's sorrow out
of his own sorrow; but conversely he was taught to forgive and redeem
his wife only by seeing God forgive and redeem the people. In other
words, the Divine was suggested by the human pain; yet the Divine Grace
was not started by any previous human grace, but, on the contrary,
was itself the precedent and origin of the latter. This is in harmony
with all Hosea's teaching. God forgives because _He is God and not
man_.[493] Our pain with those we love helps us to understand God's
pain; but it is not our love that leads us to believe in His love. On
the contrary, all human grace is but the reflex of the Divine. So St.
Paul: _Even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye_. So St. John: _We
love Him_, and one another, _because He first loved us_.
But this return from the nation to the individual has another
interest. Gomer's redemption is not the mere formal completion of the
parallel between her and her people. It is, as the story says, an
impulse of the Divine Love, recognised even then in Israel as seeking
the individual. He who followed Hagar into the wilderness, who met
Jacob at Bethel and forgat not the slave Joseph in prison,[494]
remembers also Hosea's wife. His love is not satisfied with His
Nation-Bride: He remembers this single outcast. It is the Shepherd
leaving the ninety-and-nine in the fold to seek the one lost sheep.
* * * * *
For Hosea himself his home could never be the same as it was at the
first. _And I said to her, For many days shalt thou abide, as far as
I am concerned, alone. Thou shalt not play the harlot. Thou shalt not
be for a husband: and I on my side also shall be so towards thee._
Discipline was needed there; and abroad the nation's troubles called
the prophet to an anguish and a toil which left no room for the sweet
love or hope of his youth. He steps at once to his hard warfare for
his people; and through the rest of his book we never again hear him
speak of home, or of children, or of wife. So Arthur passed from
Guinevere to his last battle for his land:--
"Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God
Forgives: do thou for thine own soul the rest.
But how to take last leave of all I loved?
* * * * *
I cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine;...
I cannot take thy hand; that too is flesh,
And in the flesh thou hast sinned; and mine own flesh,
Here looking down on thine polluted, cries
'I loathe thee'; yet not less, O Guinevere,
For I was ever virgin save for thee,
My love thro' flesh hath wrought into my life
So far, that my doom is, I love thee still.
Let no man dream but that I love thee still.
Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul,
And so thou lean on our fair father Christ,
Hereafter in that world where all are pure
We two may meet before high God, and thou
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know
I am thine husband, not a smaller soul....
Leave me that,
I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence,
Thro' the thick night I hear the trumpet blow."
FOOTNOTES:
[450] ii. 23, Heb.
[451] ii. 20, Heb.
[452] vi. 3, 4; vii. 8; ix. 10; xiv. 6, 7, 8.
[453] vii. 11, 12; x. 11; xi. 4, etc.
[454] Pregnant construction, _hath committed great harlotry from
after Jehovah_.
[455] These personal names do not elsewhere occur. גֹּמֶר; Γομερ.
דִּבְלַיִם; Δεβηλαιμ B; Δεβηλαειμ, AQ. They have, of course, been
interpreted allegorically in the interests of the theory discussed
below. גמר has been taken to mean "completion," and interpreted as
various derivatives of that root: Jerome, "the perfect one"; Raschi,
"that fulfilled all evil"; Kimchi, "fulfilment of punishment";
Calvin, "consumptio," and so on. דבלים has been traced to דִּבלה, Pl.
דִּבְלִים, cakes of pressed figs, as if a name had been sought to
connect the woman at once with the idol-worship and a rich sweetness;
or to an Arabic root, דבל, to press, as if it referred either to the
plumpness of the body (cf. Ezek. xvi. 7; so Hitzig) or to the woman's
habits. But all these are far-fetched and vain. There is no reason
to suppose that either of the two names is symbolic. The alternative
(allowed by the language) naturally suggests itself that דבלים is the
name of Gomer's birthplace. But there is nothing to prove this. No
such place-name occurs elsewhere: one cannot adduce the Diblathaim in
Moab (Num. xxxiii. 46 ff.; Jer. xlviii. 2).
[456] _Hist. Geog._, Chap. XVIII.
[457] רֻחָמָה לֹא, probably 3rd pers. sing. fem. Pual (in Pause
cf. Prov. xxviii. 13); literally, _She is not loved_ or _pitied_.
The word means love as pity: "such pity as a father hath unto his
children dear" (Psalm ciii.), or God to a penitent man (Psalm
xxviii. 13). The Greek versions alternate between love and pity.
LXX. οὐκ ἠλεημένη διότι οὐ μὴ προσθήσω ἔτι ἠλεῆσαι, for which the
Complutensian has ἀγαπῆσαι, the reading followed by Paul (Rom. ix,
25: cf. 1 Peter ii. 10).
[458] Here ver. 7 is to be omitted, as explained above, p. 213.
[459] Do not belong to you; but the _I am_, אהיה, recalls the _I am
that I am_ of Exodus.
[460] Augustine, Ambrose, Theodoret, Cyril Alex. and Theodore of
Mopsuestia.
[461] It is interesting to read in parallel the interpretations of
Matthew Henry and Dr. Pusey. They are very alike, but the latter has
the more delicate taste of his age.
[462] i. 2.
[463] The former is Matthew Henry's; the latter seems to be implied
by Pusey.
[464] Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_.
[465] Apparently it was W. R. Smith's interpretation which caused
Kuenen to give up the allegorical theory.
[466] Two instances are usually quoted. The one is Isaiah vi., where
most are agreed that what Isaiah has stated there as his inaugural
vision is not only what happened in the earliest moments of his
prophetic life, but this spelt out and emphasised by his experience
since. See _Isaiah I.-XXXIX._ (Exp. Bible), pp. 57 f. The other
instance is Jeremiah xxxii. 8, where the prophet tells us that he
became convinced that the Lord spoke to him on a certain occasion
only after a subsequent event proved this to be the case.
[467] An Eastern woman seldom weans her child before the end of its
second year.
[468] iii. 2.
[469] From a speech by John Bright.
[470] iv. 13, 14.
[471] Cf. the spiritual use of the term, Isa. lxii. 4.
[472] For proof and exposition of all this see Robertson Smith,
_Religion of the Semites_, 92 ff.
[473] ii. 8.
[474] So best is rendered חסד, ḥesedh, which means always not merely
an affection, "lovingkindness," as our version puts it, but a
relation loyally observed.
[475] An expansion of this will be found in the present writer's
_Isaiah XL.-LXVI._ (Expositor's Bible Series), pp. 398 ff.
[476] ii. 13.
[477] ii. 5, 13.
[478] ii. 5.
[479] See above, p. 235.
[480] The participle Qal, used by God of Himself in His proclamations
of grace or of punishment, has in this passage (cf. ver. 16) and
elsewhere (especially in Deuteronomy) the force of an immediate future.
[481] So LXX.; Mass. Text, _thy_.
[482] The reading גְּדֵרָהּ is more probable than גְּדֵרָה.
[483] Or _they made it into a Ba'al_ image. So Ew., Hitz., Nowack.
But Wellhausen omits the clause.
[484] Wellhausen thinks that up to ver. 14 only physical calamities
are meant, but the הצלתו of ver. 11, as well as others of the terms
used, imply not the blighting of crops before their season, but the
carrying of them away in their season, when they had fully ripened,
by invaders. The cessation of all worship points to the removal of
the people from their land, which is also implied, of course, by the
promise that they shall be sown again in ver. 23.
[485] Cf. Isa. xl. 1: which to the same exiled Israel is the
fulfilment of the promise made by Hosea. See _Isaiah XL.-LXVI._
(Expositor's Bible), pp. 75 ff.
[486] Wellhausen calls ver. 18 a gloss to ver. 19.
[487] Massoretic Text, _her_.
[488] It is at this point, if at any, that i. 10, 11, ii. 1 (Eng.,
but ii. 1-3 Heb.) ought to come in. It will be observed, however,
that even here they are superfluous: _And the number of the children
of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured
nor counted; and it shall be in the place where it was said to them,
No People of Mine are ye! it shall be said to them, Sons of the
Living God! And the children of Judah and the children of Israel
shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint themselves one
head, and shall go up from the land: for great is the day of Jezreel.
Say unto your brothers, My People, and to your sisters_ (LXX.
_sister_), _She-is-Pitied_. On the whole passage see above, p. 213.
[489] Or _that is loved of her husband though an adulteress_.
[490] So LXX. The homer was eight bushels. The lethech is a measure
not elsewhere mentioned.
[491] On these see above, Introduction, Chap. III., p. 38.
[492] On the text see above, p. 214.
[493] xi. 9.
[494] As the stories all written down before this had made familiar
to Israel.